cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/25445621
How did the transition go? Do you like the new service(s) so far?
Yes, I canceled my Ultimate account. Andy can believe whatever he wants in private, but publicly stepping outside of non-partisan policy advocacy at this exact moment in time was a red flag, doubly so because he espoused his personal politics through an official business account in his response to the Reddit thread.
Email/calendar went to Tuta, AirVPN for VPN, BitWarden for passwords. Everything is encouragingly smooth so far.
Fair warning: Tuta’s email import is very new and only available on the more expensive tier at the moment (not sure if that’s permanent). I didn’t have any problems, but there were some issues a few weeks ago.
I do think people are over-reacting to Andy’s words and assigning him political views he didn’t express. He didn’t endorse Trump or the Republican party at large, and definitely didn’t “go full MAGA” or express Nazi sympathies. His statements about Democrats I partially agree with and partially disagree. His remarks about the priorities and actions of Republicans, though, were pure tailpipe-huffing fantasy. Being able to say these absurd things in public–under an official business account no less–shows poor judgement and implies he might believe other absurd things he isn’t willing to say publicly.
Another factor in my decision: Proton’s privacy policy specifies they can modify the policy at any time with no notification to users, and deems continued use of the services as agreement to the updated terms. The updated terms they didn’t notify you about.
That being said, no service provider is perfect. I don’t think Proton stores enough data to really be a concern if they turned over everything they have. But this whole thing is based on trust. Even with their clients being open-source software, you’re trusting that they always serve the same browser scripts that they published. You trust that the password you provide at key generation or login isn’t ever passed back to their servers. You trust that they don’t keep unencrypted copies of your emails, files, or VPN activity. You trust that they aren’t going to modify their privacy policy and quietly undo protections you thought you had.
The way Andy responded was enough to question my trust in the company with him at the helm. I didn’t leave as a heavy rebuke, just as a “do better”. There are plenty of other companies which provide equivalent services. That’s the risk companies take when a major part of their market is ideological people: if you chafe their ideology they’re more likely to put the effort into leaving.
I still like and trust Proton and won’t be switching. They’ve built up enough good will. Hopefully they don’t keep burning through it though. I’m still sour over the lack of feature parity, linux support, reliance on Google for notifications, etc.
I left and canceled my plan. No alternative yet as I was migrating from Google.
I also left my plan, even refunded the amount, since my renewal was set on January 1st.
Main reason I used Proton was their VPN, especially their wide range of servers and countries helped me. But now I don’t need that many individual country servers anymore, so I settled to Mullvad, mainly because their prices are very competitive and they are considered “trusted” (even though I kinda miss port forwarding, I’d rather not have it, than trust in AirVPN or other smaller services).
I used their mail for a little while, so migration was rather simple. I currently test out Posteo, when I am happy with them, I might stick to them.
Same with Drive, I didn’t use them, mainly because they do not have proper Linux support (no, rclone isn’t sufficient).
Thankfully I didn’t use them as my password manager (and definitely not as a crypto wallet service) :D
Port forwarding or nothing for me. Do you just… Go without now?
I’m working on getting off it, planning to self host. It’s unfortunate, because I was all in and working to degoogle, so it’s all a mess right now
honesty seems like a overreaction, if proton’s goals and actions don’t change I’m fine with staying (even if I disagree with trump). it’s one person on the board not the entire company as well. however I have considered leaving proton due to bad linux support and no de-googled notifications. afaia proton is the cheapest for what I use it for (vpn+mail+email aliasing+drive (barely using it due to no Linux client)), please tell me if I’m wrong. protonvpn has port fowarding support which I use to host servers sometimes.
As a Linux person, I, too, am somewhat tired of being treated like a second-class user. Having no Linux client for Drive is a real pain.
This is the single-most annoying thing with Proton for me. Give us a Linux client for drive already… 😭
Supposedly rclone can work with Proton Drive, but for me at least, it seemed way too complicated to set up.
Yes, I tried to set it up before, but wasn’t successful either. So I decided it’s not worth putting hours of work into it, to make it work in some hacky way that will break down anyway any chance it gets.
No, I literally just moved to proton like 3 months prior to the comments and still in the process of moving my less used services to the new email from my Gmail. Not really willing to do it all again so soon. Maybe if something else happens which is more serious, but a single event is a bit much to make such a large decision in my opinion. If it’s systemic and continues to happen then yes I will think about moving.
I was never on Proton. Back when I decided to degoogle my digital life I landed on a short list between proton and tutamail. So I deep dive into both. When I researched Proton it stank of corporate technobro culture. The crypto wallet, trying to be an everything platform/brand, style over functionality programming, the communications. It all reeked of corpo bs.
Their only pro was operating from Swiss legal protections. So I landed on Tuta. Not because they were any particularly better, but because they were focused on doing one thing and one thing only at a time. They were also more focused on features over marketing buzzwords which I liked.
I am currently still using their stuff since my husband and I just purchased a longer subscription as a bulk purchase, but we will not be renewing and I am actively researching alternatives for the VPN and emails.
The emails is the more difficult part for me, because everyone suggests hosting your own on your own domain, but to me that just seems like a great way to have any site you tie your email to to be directly linked to your house. Unless I am massively misunderstanding how that would work, in which case any resources would be greatly appreciated.
You don’t have to self-host email (which is a pain) with a custom domain. Most of the providers will let you point your domain’s email at their servers, with a few DNS entries. The major (IMO) benefit of that is that your email address is decoupled from your email provider, so changing providers in the future doesn’t require you to tell all your contacts.
Thank you! This helps, and while it doesn’t solve the issue of the @ being recognizable, it does solve a lot of issues.
You would need to register your domain with someone who offers privacy from Whois lookups (they all should). Your contact information will be discoverable with a subpoena. A mail relay like Duck or Firefox would be an additional layer of anonymity but idk how they will respond to law enforcement
Mullvad VPN has worked well for me.
I canceled the night of and moved to a combination of Mailbox and Tuta (trying to diversify a little). I also provided a colorful reason for terminating to make sure they knew exactly why.
So far they each have their quirks, but overall I like them. I also set up two domains for email so that the next switch won’t be as jarring (since I can just keep using the domain addresses).
I already used Mullvad for VPN, so that was a non-issue.
I was looking into proton as an alternative to Google. I am no longer looking at them because of Andy’s comments and doubling down. I feel like I’m giving enough companies with questionable ethics my information and money without giving it to them too. If the company wants to come to a consensus about making a public statement that separates them from his comments I’ll consider those when they happen.
I downgraded from the Ultimate plan because I don’t really need the VPN. It hasn’t exactly achieved much because now I just have additional credit on my account.
If the CEO hasn’t been replaced by the time my annual subscription comes up for renewal I’ll migrate elsewhere. It’s a pain because their email and calendar are half decent but I’m really not impressed with the company’s failure to take responsibility.
I use Azire for vpn since they own their servers and let you use a plain old wireguard client. Before that I used Mullvad but I need port forwarding and a few sites I frequent blocked it for some reason. Only use Proton’s VPN for less sensitive stuff and being able to exit in lots of countries. The inconsistency in all the apps’ UIs sort of irks me, and the lack of a drive client for Linux is a negative.
I only recently finished migrating all my email to Proton so I’m probably leaving it for now. But I’m eyeballing replacements. His comments on X seemingly sucking up to Trump weirds me out… especially after the shock and awe shit show happening this week
I see a few people who don’t want to switch due to the hassle it would take with changing email addresses, presumably because they use one of the @proton.me email domains. Get your own email domain! It’s super cheap (if you choose one of the new TLDs, it can be as low as few dollars a year), the setup isn’t really hard - you just change a few DNS values, and that’s basically it - you can use whatever email you want that ends with your domain. It might take a while to slowly replace all your @proton.me emails with your domain one, but if you’re not in a hurry and change any old mail you see during your day-to-day activities, you’ll eventually be done with it, and you can set up mail forwarding to your domain for mail that arrives to your old @proton.me address.
And if you ever need to move to a different provider, you just change the DNS records again to a new provider, and your email will start coming to the new one immediately.
